by John Kerry
I became part of the leadership of the campaign. I helped to win the race that saw the first Catholic priest ever elected to the U.S. Congress. Most important, some of the best friends I’ve made throughout my career came from that campaign, which shaped Massachusetts politics for years to come. Bob Drinan became an important voice in Congress, serving on the Judiciary Committee and helping to craft the impeachment of President Nixon. He and I became friends. I will always look back on that election as a victory of aspiration over ambition.
I did face a practical reality, however. I had mustered out of the Navy early in order to run. Six weeks later I had ceded that option to someone else, so what was I going to do next? I was already an ardent environmentalist. My childhood nature walks in the woods of Massachusetts with my mother had always stuck with me—her somewhat hokey but earnest exhortation to stand silently among the trees, close your eyes and “just listen.” My mother could identify birds by their call.
Later, Rachel Carson awakened all of us with her book Silent Spring. Friends were already busy organizing the first Earth Day in Massachusetts, so I did some events with them, trying to build on the awareness that came through the caucus, including speaking at the Earth Day events in Massachusetts. Again, there was a feeling of belonging, of possibilities. Twenty million Americans rocked the nation that first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Merely by coming out and making a powerful statement of personal concern about the environment, they gave birth to a political movement that turned the environment into a voting issue. They forced Nixon to take note of a powerful new constituency; he even signed the Environmental Protection Agency into law. Before then, it had been okay to vote against the environment. What had been deemed acceptable was now taboo. It was a sea change, a lasting lesson for me of what can happen when important issues become voting issues. Accountability works, but individual citizens must make it work. Only those who decide to work their asses off end up holding public officials accountable.
May 23, 1970, Julia and I were married at her family’s Long Island home looking out on Great South Bay. The ceremony was both traditional and modern; for her dress, Julia chose a family heirloom passed down from generation to generation for close to two hundred years, but in a nod to the times, we chose “witnesses” from among our closest friends and family, not traditional attendants. Before we were whisked away by helicopter for our wedding night in the city, my college friends threw me into the pond. When we arrived back at our apartment, I discovered my new father-in-law had sent us some surprise guests: large brown fish were swimming in our bathtub. Julia wasn’t quite as amused by her father’s idea of a practical joke. The next day we set off for Jamaica, a honeymoon trip with David Thorne and his wife, Rose, and our friends George Butler and his wife. It was an innocent, quirky time.
I’d come up short in my long-shot race for the House, but I was hooked by grassroots politics. Out of uniform, my hair was growing a little longer. A whole generation was transformed. David Thorne and I had gone from short-haired freshmen at Yale to Beatles impressionists. Just out of uniform, we now appeared as shaggy-haired, gangly twenty-six-year-olds, feeling we’d weathered a lot of living in just over a quarter century. But we weren’t alone. Since David and I had met as college freshmen, Bob Dylan had gone electric. The Beach Boys and the Beatles had traveled an electric journey of their own. The Beatles moved fast from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “Revolution.” Their journeys were helped along by marijuana, acid and Eastern influences; ours by a war and a whole lot of disillusionment, but everything was converging in 1970.
Amid the chaos and constant flurry of life at that moment, I still had to pick my next battle. Only a few months out of the Navy and hearing regularly from my friends still in Vietnam as well as those who’d returned, everything kept coming back to the war, the war, the war. The effort to persuade people during the lead-up to the caucus had underscored the power of our personal testimony about Vietnam. Most Americans didn’t know the reality. They had heard Walter Cronkite turn against the war, but they hadn’t heard from veterans themselves.
Early opposition to the war had seemed relegated to the fringes. The early demonstrations seemed out of sync, the war itself completely distant. However, with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which ultimately led to Lyndon Johnson’s call for five hundred thousand troops in Vietnam, the scope and depth of the protests began to grow. In 1967 the first March on the Pentagon jolted the country. Draft-card burnings became more frequent. America took notice of blood being dumped on the steps of the Pentagon. The shock value of creative, radical protest increased the polarization of the country. Families were torn apart over the war. Life decisions about marriage, possibly going to jail, leaving the country, all reached the heartland. The war shattered a traditional passing of responsibility from one generation to another. It began to change the nation and, for many, made it unrecognizable. Language, music, dance, dress, people at all levels of society—the entire culture of America—were in turmoil, dragged, sometimes willingly and sometimes kicking and screaming, through turbulent upheaval.
I could relate to upheaval because I’d lived it. My decision to go into the Navy shortly after President Johnson’s call for more troops now felt as though it had taken place in another world and time. But by 1970 the change was sweeping and profound. There was no center, and if there was, it clearly couldn’t hold.
There was an infectious certainty in the air that we were onto something transformative. We believed we were defining a new world and thinking bigger than we even had at the dawn of the Kennedy administration. Indeed, it was a different Kennedy—Bobby—whose challenge to Lyndon Johnson seemed revolutionary, even in the bold title of his campaign book, To Seek a Newer World. It was a fitting phrase for our mission now.
I needed to join this parade of activism. Because of my visible anti-war stand at the caucus, I began to be asked to speak at various events, particularly those involving veterans. I noticed an advertisement in Life magazine for Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). The ad featured an image of a rifle with a fixed bayonet on it, planted in the ground with a helmet hanging on top. It was a powerfully evocative symbol. It meant there were a lot of other guys out there who felt as I did. It may have been Peggy who suggested I check out VVAW at the group’s Labor Day events, including a march to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington and his troops had spent a famous winter after a string of setbacks.
Looking at the flyers for the event, I thought immediately of the powerful link between the Vietnam veterans marching in 1970 and the original revolutionary patriots whose endurance was essential to the survival of a democratic experiment in its infancy. Both the men in uniform in 1777–1778 and those in 1970 who’d served or were serving still were all trying to put their country on course.
I signed up as a speaker. I was not particularly enthusiastic to join other parts of what was a weekend-long, eighty-six-mile demonstration of sorts. Operation Rapid American Withdrawal, or RAW, as it was called, included guerrilla theater to convey the brutality of war. I thought that would just scare people off. Part of me flashed back to the reaction of passengers on that flight home to New York. It made me think about the need to know our audience and to communicate who we were, not who they might fear we were. At the same time, I realized, even then, that if I was going to have any say about what this group did, I had to be willing to sign up and help organize. In many ways, the culture of the VVAW was still a military one: I would have to prove myself to those men already on the front lines of the anti-war movement, the same way I did when I inherited my crews on Swift boats who had been fighting long before I showed up. The vets felt abused by the politicians who had sent them off to this war. Some were in terrible shape, physically and emotionally. Many carried a story they were burning to tell, a story that could spill out in tears and cries of pain, but also with remarkable eloquence. Many had never known the welcome home I had received, the tenderness of a family and a fiancée who perha
ps didn’t understand everything we all went through but embraced us—especially me—with open arms. For many veterans and even their families, protest was therapy and catharsis.
While, on reflection, I almost certainly did return with some PTSD, I was lucky to get immersed immediately in efforts to help other veterans. I think that helped me as I saw so many guys seriously messed up. Perhaps I was also conditioned—a product of a buttoned-up education and family where I was taught as a kid to keep a “stiff upper lip.” But I had to tell my story. So I spoke at Valley Forge, expressed the anger I felt for the incompetence and stubborn myopia that I had witnessed, expressed the outrage of all veterans against the war who heard politicians tell us it wasn’t patriotic to oppose it, when in fact better men than they had spent a winter at Valley Forge to win for all Americans exactly that right.
And we had earned the right to speak our mind and to set our country back on course. It was liberating. Valley Forge reinforced in me just how important it was for our voices to be heard. I couldn’t yet speak about Don Droz or Persh or my other friends who were in graves, gone far too soon for a war gone wrong. I just couldn’t speak their names. It was still too raw, but I found purpose in saying to anyone there who was listening that it was immoral to send thousands upon thousands of men to die for a mistake.
I started to throw myself more into the life of a full-time activist. The invitations to speak at local gatherings piled up. As I spoke publicly about the war, I became more effective at articulating the combination of anger and facts that wove a compelling argument. I had to tread carefully. There was the war itself, about which we were unanimous, and then there were other issues—injustice, rank discrimination against African Americans and Hispanics, the inequities of the draft among them—that were intertwined with the war but on which there was no unanimity. We all felt a level of alienation from our government. That was ironic for me. Eight years earlier I’d sailed with a president of the United States, and now I was dedicating my time to protesting a policy that had been escalated by his own vice president and that was being expanded even further by a new president, the man he’d defeated in 1960.
We veterans were particularly turned off by the bromides of politicians who talked about supporting the troops but forgot us by the time we came home. I heard story after story about VA hospitals in New York and elsewhere where the care was an insult—unsanitary conditions, suicides, a parade of horrors. I was lucky. You always tell yourself, “There but for the grace of God go I,” but there were guys in VVAW in wheelchairs, their spines severed by bullets; guys missing eyes and limbs; men looking troubled and vacant, with wounds that weren’t so visible. All too often we found that if it wasn’t you yourself, you had a friend who couldn’t adjust to being home. There was a lot of self-medication. In all this agony of transitioning out of war and into civilian life, few of us felt as if the government was on our side. Many vets could no longer relate to their father’s generation at the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the American Legion. Thus, without a singular moment of decision, without debate, we coalesced into a new fighting force determined to do battle for the veterans—for our own agenda, not just against the war.
We connected with a leading, innovative therapist, Dr. Robert Lifton at Yale University, and together we helped veterans build their own support groups, pioneering “rap sessions,” where vets could share their painful stories with other vets. It was part of the healing process, and it was part of the process that probably previous generations—the “stiff upper lip” generation—couldn’t relate to, but it was saving lives. We started raising money for this kind of therapy. We even worked to raise money to support a rehabilitation farm for veterans who were really struggling, horribly haunted by the experience of combat. There were times when I wasn’t certain of the approach, but I came to understand we all heal in different ways. My healing required activism. What was critical to me was, as it has always been, the act of just getting up in the morning and pressing forward, but different people are motivated differently. And, in fairness, different branches of the service saw different wars. It is in many ways remarkable that as many veterans from different units, in different parts of Vietnam, carrying out different missions, all saw the war as similarly as they did.
And no matter how one saw the war, I thought it was essential we give a damn about each other, because the government wasn’t living up to fundamental promises. We were losing vets at home—to alcohol, narcotics, depression, PTSD, unemployment, inadequate benefits and, perhaps mostly, a complete indifference across the nation—if not hostility—to our service. In the end, we lost more returning vets to these curses than there are names on the Wall of those lost in Vietnam. Rather than addressing these concerns, our “leaders” were playing to the divisions, to the lowest common denominator of politics. Right out front was Vice President Spiro Agnew blasting away, trying to define who was American and who wasn’t. The administration’s rhetoric became more and more frantic, more divisive. We knew there were many ways to be patriotic. Telling the truth was prime among them. In the end, Agnew neither told the truth nor lived up to his own rhetoric. He resigned as a confirmed crook, having betrayed his office and his nation.
Almost to a member, VVAW consisted of men who hated the war but still loved their country.
I was invited to attend the next big VVAW gathering, Operation Winter Soldier, set for January 1971 in Detroit, Michigan. I was told the Midwest had been chosen as the venue in order to try to reach people—voters—in the heartland, perhaps a chance for veterans to give their “testimony” about the war they’d seen and to appeal to those who might be receptive to their message. I went as a kind of observer. All attendees were instructed to bring their discharge papers—DD-214s—as proof of their service. What I heard and saw in Detroit was disturbing, raw and human. Grown men breaking down in anguish, describing terrible, terrible things that they’d seen and done, actions they said had robbed them of their youth and their innocence. It was painful to listen. It wasn’t what we’d seen on the Swift boats, though we had our share of haunting memories and sorrow—for example, machine-gun fire aimed into an oncoming Vietnamese fishing junk that had failed to heed our command to stop, only to discover that a woman or a child was caught in the cross fire. Free-fire zones, harassment and interdiction, burning thatched huts and villages in VC areas despite knowing that the VC would rebuild and indoctrinate an angrier population—that was the war many of us resented. That’s certainly the war I brought home and could speak to. But these men in Detroit were speaking to something different and even more horrifying: throwing one prisoner out of an airplane in the hope of making his terrified comrade confess, a necklace of VC ears worn around the neck like a trophy. Much was written about the My Lai Massacre and the Phoenix Program and other places where the war went wrong. These weren’t examples of what the average veteran experienced, but they weren’t complete outliers either. We all knew horrible things had happened. My heart hurt for these broken young vets, many of whom had gone abroad for the first time to a country they didn’t understand to kill an enemy they didn’t know for a cause that seemed dubious or out of reach. So many were fresh out of high school, off a farm or out of a small town in the Midwest or South.
Some have speculated as to whether everyone there was telling the truth. I don’t know. PTSD, nightmares, catatonia—I can’t tell you if everyone there was sharing his own experience or some amalgamation of what he had experienced, heard or seen. We wondered even at the time whether there were Nixon plants and moles inside the group to discredit and disrupt the meeting, something Nixon advisor Chuck Colson would one day confess to me was true.
I thought the depths of pain released during those three days, coupled with the continuity between testimonies, all documented by each person’s official papers certifying his service in Vietnam and corroborated in many cases by others from the same units, all combined to provide a remarkable validation of what they were saying. As with any testimony
in any situation of proving something, witnesses are judged in the totality of their presentation. Anyone legitimately there to listen and learn could not see young men bare their souls so painfully, with such obvious grief and guilt, without being profoundly concerned about what they were saying.
Veterans would break down, leave the room to smoke or come back drunk or high. None of it appeared contrived. But I did wonder whether there was any possibility the country could “hear” and “digest” the rawness of what the veterans were saying.
Activism is about one thing and one thing only—a goal. The stated goal was to persuade Americans about the war. I couldn’t see how this would really help end the war. The media response confirmed my reaction. There was close to total silence. It angered me that such obviously searing testimony couldn’t be processed. I think the media just didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t believe everything I heard, but there was more than enough corroboration, more than enough linkage to incidents we had heard about and more than enough veracity in the presentations for the veterans to be taken seriously. These veterans deserved to be heard. But most of the media apparently thought otherwise. Someone from the press shared with my friend that for reporters to come, “you need more amputees.” Appalling. When veterans couldn’t be heard because of what they looked like, something was wrong.